Back in early March we made a hotfix to remove loot and bonus roll eligibility for players that defeated Oondasta and Nalak while visiting from a different realm. At the time, the change was made to address realm stability issues. Since then, we’ve address those issues by making tuning adjustments for Oondasta such as increasing the spawn rate, and reducing Oondasta’s health by 50%.

In an upcoming hotfix, players coalesced from a different realm will be eligible to receive loot or use a bonus roll after defeating Oondasta or Nalak once more. Keep in mind, players are still only eligible to receive loot or use a bonus roll once a week.

This change will take effect in each region after their scheduled weekly realm maintenance.

Mogu Rune of Fate – Lesser Charm Change

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

We’re deploying a hotfix late tonight that will reduce the number of Lesser Charms of Good Fortune required to purchase 3 Mogu Runes of Fate from 90 down to 50. Meaning when you log in Wednesday and purchase your 3 Mogu Runes of Fate, which are used for 5.2 raid boss bonus rolls, it will only cost you 50 Lesser Charms.

We recommend waiting until after the scheduled Wednesday maintenance to ensure this change has gone through before purchasing your Runes.

Patch 5.2 Hotfixes: April 22

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker)

Creatures

Players coalesced from a different realm are now eligible to receive loot or use a bonus roll after defeating Oondasta or Nalak.

Sinister Primal Diamond should now correctly have different activation rates depending on the class and specialization. In addition, activation rate for Fire Mages has been increased.

Upcoming Pet Passive Changes

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

We're going to be buffing some pet passives in a future patch, and elementals are on the list. We feel that the elemental passive is currently too confusing in that it is somewhat ambiguous with regard to direct effects of weather, but not effects that are not directly related to weather.

For example, if your opponent has a pet that gains an additional attack in a Blizzard, they will still get the additional attack against your elemental pet. This can feel bad in some cases and we want pet passives to always feel good and useful. We also feel that weather is one of the more fun and synergistic elements of Pet Battles, so at this point in time, we’re thinking of redesigning the elemental pet passive along the lines of a ~50% reduction in damage for the turn one is swapped in. Our goal being that we’d rather have a passive in place that increases the strategic depth of elemental pets, and is clear in its intention and functionality.

Keep in mind, we’re still evaluating the numbers and everything is subject to change, but we’d sincerely appreciate any constructive feedback you may have!

Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Patch 5.3 Experience ChangesHow will it work...

Scenario 1:

Before the patch: Character has 50/200 xp, xp bar shows 25% progress to next level.

After the patch: Character has 50/100 xp, xp bar shows 50% progress to next level.

Scenario 2:

Before the patch: Character has 102/200 xp, xp bar shows 51% progress to next level.

After the patch: Character has 102/100 xp, and will level as soon as they gain an experience point.

World PvP and Gear
That is referring to world PvP. In world PvP, those in full Conquest gear "should be pretty competitive with a Heroic raid–geared player—they may have more survivability, but you might do more damage." In instanced PvP, such as Arena and Battlegrounds the player in PvP gear will have an upper hand, and the player with PvE gear has the better equipment for dungeons and raids.

Ask the Devs Questions
Mobius, to answer your question as to why your question was not taken:

Any changes planned for DKs? Like removing the rp cost from Icebound Fortitude or removing the health loss every 2 sec from Unholy Frenzy.
As you can see, the question is not about the planned changes for patch 5.3. For those that are complaining that you aren't satisfied with the questions we responded to, take into consideration the following things:

Did you ask a question? We only took questions that were posted in the Ask the Devs thread. If you don't ask, we can't answer.

Was your question about the patch 5.3 changes relating to PvP? If not, then it was not taken because it broke one of the first rules for the Ask the Devs

Did you up-vote questions you wanted to see answered? The highest voted questions were the ones we chose.

There were many questions that were able to be asked about the 5.3 changes for PvP. There was a new battleground, a new arena, many class changes that would affect PvP and as can be seen, resilience changes. No questions were avoided, if they met the rules of the thread and were voted for, then they were chosen.

The major things which are constanly posted about here and on the usa forums: too much burst, too much cc +remove the pve trinkets, are simply ignored.
There are actually responses to all three of those. The Devs spoke about CC, the PvE trinkets and the burst they create. Unfortunately, if you check the Ask the Devs thread, there are no questions which actually asked about the 5.3 changes and the way in which they would address burst, outside of those pertaining to the Shado-Pan trinkets. If you wanted an answer specifically to the ways in which 5.3 was planning to address your particular issues with burst, then you should have asked them. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Tier 15 Interview With Method
Manaflask has once again interviewed Method about their thoughts on this tier of content. You can see the hightlights below, or read the full interview on Manaflask.

10 and 25 player difficulties are different races due to the different difficulty of the bosses in each size.

Due to the difficulty differences, Method no longer feels like they are directly competing against Paragon anymore.

The lack of any gating was nice, as was the longer period of pure progression.

The boss tuning was well done in this tier, with the exception of Twin Consorts (which was hotfixed).

Lei Shen was well tuned, well designed, and one of the better encounters in the game.

Ra-den was significantly easier than Lei Shen, and really was a bonus boss rather than the "final boss" of the tier.

The opinion on limited attempts on Ra-den was split, with some guild members liking it and some disliking it.

Everyone agreed that Dark Animus was the most frustrating boss due to the wipes early in the fight.

Congratulations Method for slaughtering Blood Legion this tier, despite their one day head start each reset! The only reason BL got any 25man world firsts was because of the earlier reset couplied with blizzard nerfing twins by 15%, when method were so far ahead on that race already.

Wow has always been more about time spent than skill I dunno why people are shocked by this.....Wow is a low skill cap ceiling game as far as PvE anyway, as long as you're able to follow a rotation and do boss mechanics at the same time you're good to go. The main thing that holds people back is the time investment needed and its always been the case.

I think it's unhealthy. The interview said they take 5 minute breaks once every few hours, too.
But if you want to race for world first, real-life activities must be sacrificed, I suppose.

People often try to downplay how much they have to sacrifice, though. Granted, none of us are in the shoes of a world first raider, so we don't know what their personal lives are like. But if you are raiding that much, something else has to be sacrificed for it. I love this game, but I'm not so sure those sacrifices would be worth being "the best" at a game. Riggnaros always talks about how to be "the best" at something you have to produce results, come up with new ideas, etc. Wouldn't all of those skills be better served in an outlet in which career and financial opportunities are involved? You can still raid 12-15 hours per week and clear content while it's relevant. There's plenty of guilds on WoW Progress that prove this. I wonder what those guilds who raid 20-25 hours per week and still lose to 12-15 per hour week guilds think when it happens.

This has got nothing to do with learning a skill as complicated as playing piano, this is wow, this is a video game, you can learn how to dps competitively with any class and any spec just by reading a forum, I'd like to see you learn to play piano by reading a forum post...

So this is what it has come to? Skill is measured by time spent?

You see, with your analogy, I'd think someone who learned piano in a few days is much more talented than some guy who had to spend months on end learning the same skill.

This is the same thing for world first, some guilds invest literally their whole life for a given period of time to get the prize, when most people aren't ready to sacrifice their whole irl life and jobs just to be first, and probably even if they could, wouldn't understand the point, this screws the measure.

This is a world first only in the sense that they are competing with guilds who have the same playtime available, and that's certainly not a whole lot, so yeah, grats to Method who got their world first in competition with what? 2, 3 other guilds?

So what? A guild that plays 5 times less often than Method but still clear the content in only a couple of months? Fuck them? They actually spent a shitload less time in the raid than Method, but because Method were willing to sacrifice their IRL, they get the "best players" tag, when other guilds cleared the content with significantly less time invested?

So, basically, for wow progress: time invested = skill ?

So yeah, grats to Method for having invested 500+ hrs of play time in less than a couple of months, them and BL are probably the only guilds in the world who could be bothered to spend so much time in there.
I just think this whole world first thing is so overblown: some guys spend their life in a raid so now they have to be acknowledged as the best? This is so wrong in so many ways I can't even be bothered to continue commenting.

To me, the world first now has little more meaning than "these guys have litteraly no life" à la South Park, rather than "these guys are so ubber skilled"...

You seem to forget the main tool for progress apart from skill; GEAR. These top guilds clear content multiple resets before anyone else and thus with worse gear. They down bosses in much worse gear than in which the boss was designed to be killed. Even now, multiple resets later some people who have just cleared normal struggle with HC Jin'rokh. For example; My raid has much better gear than what Paragon had when they started their 10man HC clears, yet my raid still struggles with the same bosses that Paragon downed with much, much worse gear than what we had.

Take for example Ulduar: For Ensidia, hardmode Hodir wasn't killable with just the gear they had, they had to use their wits to come up with something that would work, and the result you can read here. Yogg-saron +0 is another perfect example; deemed mathematically impossible, yet suddenly some taiwanese guild called Stars appears out of nowhere and manages to barely kill the boss with barely seconds to spare. How's that not skill and is only about investing more time than others?

Also, you can learn how to DPS by reading forums, yes. But you simply can't match the dps what the top guilds are pulling just by reading forums. You need to learn your class inside out and play it like it's your second nature if you want to be as competitive as those guys. Pulling off the perfect rotations while looking out for boss timers, stuff on the ground and the possible adds included in the fight isn't something you can do without knowing your class and just by reading forums.

And no, this isn't restricted to only top guilds. Every guild can have one or more good dps that tops the charts on a certain boss, but still the guild can struggle because the others aren't putting up the same numbers or are learning the fights more slowly, or are just more prone to screwing up multiple times on the same thing. An event which doesn't happen too often with the top guilds.

You can argue all you want, but it's not just about the time that they invest in it, but also about individual skill and teamwork.

To conclude this, let me throw you a question, and be honest; with the gear you and your guild currently have and will obtain in the future, do you think you would be able to clear the entire raid on heroic within the next 4-8 resets? Time investment shouldn't come into play there anymore if you think that all bosses are easy and just by investing a bit more time than the rest you're able to get the kills first.

Following you argument, everyone who is exceptionally good with something due to long and hard practice, is not worth the approval, because they needed so much time to practice. It's like saying, an exceptional good piano player, that practices about 8 hours a day (and believe me, they do), is worse than some guy out there, who only practices 4 hours a day and who is playing quite nice.

There is only one method to measure the rank of a guild quantitatively, and that is by kill order or progress speed. No one can really say what would happen, if Method was only allowed to play for a certain amount of time per week. No one would tell an athlete to only workout or practice their sport with a constraint, that would be kind of strange, right?
Well, one can say what happens, if a guild is only allowed a certain amount of tries per week, I think we have seen that this tier.

And I really like if someone says, a guild can post whatever and whenever they want on their channel/page and in the same post gets upset about a newssite, that does not post exactly the news this person wants to be posted.

(sorry for my english, not a native speaker)

That's a bold statement there.

The reality is like the guys says, if you play this game 16 hours a day for two to three weeks you are bound to actually finish the tier somewhere near the top, just because instead of 20 attempts at a boss you get 100-200, that's called brute forcing really. There's guilds in the top 200 (including mine) who are now 11/13 with as little as 4 hours a raid night with 3 raids a week - and that's like not really too far off from the top guilds, at 12 hours a weeks vs. 112 hours a week for the top guild (if we assume 16h x 7day) - just picture that, just do it, it's insane amount of time spent no wonder they make 10 times faster progress.

The dedication of the "top" guilds is certainly admirable and I personally don't deny their success or envy them in the slightest, but you have to understand that they are at the top simply because their members chose WoW in front everything else (school, work, family) for as long as the content is not beat, not because they are the best players.

Personally I couldn't deal with such a schedule, I got work to worry about and a family, 3 raids nights at 4 hours is the most I'm willing to invest into this game and even that is much some times - does that mean I'm less skilled? I certainly don't believe so, it just means I'm not investing the same amount of time, and there's tons of players out there equally skilled or even higher, that can not commit to the schedule of top raiding guilds.

Wow has always been more about time spent than skill I dunno why people are shocked by this.....Wow is a low skill cap ceiling game as far as PvE anyway, as long as you're able to follow a rotation and do boss mechanics at the same time you're good to go. The main thing that holds people back is the time investment needed and its always been the case.

That's true for every videogame probably, the more time you spend on learning the mechanics the easier it gets... This also true for every moba and PvP game. The only times this is not true is when there is a lot of RNG involved, then luck comes to play.
Thank god there is always room for improvement through practice, and videogames are not only for the naturally skilled players.

This is why "hardcore" raiders are "the best". If you bang your head against a wall enough times, it will break.

They killed 5,6 first bosses in like 1, 2 hours each with t14 gear, come back when you could kill them within 20, 30 hours; and they did all other bosses but last ones within 1 or 2 days. I can tell you some walls will not break with 99% of current player base banging their head years against it, not even close..

I remember watching a video that was temporarily shown on this site, and it was about this guild trying to become the world first. All I
could think of was how much of a shame it was that these people were literally wasting their entire lives on something that by all rights,
is completely meaningless.

Mind you, the people who do this are grown adults and it's up to them however they want to spend their time. But this kind of playing
does not make the gaming community, especially the MMO-crowd, look very good to say the least.

That's true for every videogame probably, the more time you spend on learning the mechanics the easier it gets... This also true for every moba and PvP game. The only times this is not true is when there is a lot of RNG involved, then luck comes to play.
Thank god there is always room for improvement through practice, and videogames are not only for the naturally skilled players.

The difference in other games is that you have to spend all those hours to GET to the top....what I mean is you can't be a top player in a game like sc2 or dota by playing only 3-4 hours a day. It's literally impossible because those are high skill cap games. In a game like WoW on the other hand its very easy for someone who plays 3-4 hours a day to be at the same skill level as someone who plays 15-16 hours a day. This is where the time vs skill argument comes in. I suppose we can say that having the endurance and dedication to put that many hours in is a type of skill but different than what we think of in traditional terms.

I remember watching a video that was temporarily shown on this site, and it was about this guild trying to become the world first. All I
could think of was how much of a shame it was that these people were literally wasting their entire lives on something that by all rights,
is completely meaningless.

Mind you, the people who do this are grown adults and it's up to them however they want to spend their time. But this kind of playing
does not make the gaming community, especially the MMO-crowd, look very good to say the least.

Well I played soccer at high school to win, I would waste my entire life on team to win the competition for no real reward etc...

Why people fixate on time spent on progression while ignore the fact that Ra-den has limited attempts restriction in place? You can say they "brutal forced" other bosses but I'd question that's the case for Ra-den.

Are you unemployed?
Do you not care about personal hygiene?
Do you not care about having friends or a gf/bf?

Gratz, you are now a hardcore raider. I enjoy having sex, showering and having money so alas I can never be in a top guild. I was excited when wowprogress started posting how many attempts it took each guild to down a boss. That was going to show who really has the skill but they removed it!

Are you unemployed?
Do you not care about personal hygiene?
Do you not care about having friends or a gf/bf?

Gratz, you are now a hardcore raider. I enjoy having sex, showering and having money so alas I can never be in a top guild. I was excited when wowprogress started posting how many attempts it took each guild to down a boss. That was going to show who really has the skill but they removed it!

Not sure if this is a serious statement -- however -- the number of attempts on a boss being used as a metric to skill doesn't make sense. Maybe between the guilds who did it the first week or so, but once strategies start becoming available and the raids overall item level increases, the attempt numbers start meaning less and less.

Is it really right to spit in the face of passion? Method, Blood Legion, whatever, are incredibly passionate about something. Who are you to judge someone on what they enjoy. Many great artists would forgo hygiene and social interactions for months to indulge what they were passionate about. Obviously they aren't hurting for money if they can afford to raid these ridiculous hours. Sometimes friends you meet online can be more fun and interesting than the people you know in real life. It's really shallow to judge people in such superficial ways.

I wish I were as passionate about anything in life that these people are... it must be nice to care about something that much.